October 2006: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith

I ran across an online course syllabus for a graduate-level English class at The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign called "20th Century American Bestsellers," and it has some interesting notes about the novel, submitted as part of a student's assignment, I believe. Here's the site if you're interested. I'll post some relevant text below:

Contemporary Reception:

While the majority of critics of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn indulgently praised Betty Smith's first novel, others expressed only reluctant approval or no approval at all. What little conflict existed among 1943 reviews primarily dealt with doubts about the book's literary value. Skepticism was partially founded on the fact that Smith, a novice novelist, had yet to be established as a writer or literary fiction. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn suffered from accusations of following a predictable pattern of events that were woven together in an overly sentimental fashion. The vague sexual incidents in the novel also stirred up mild controversy among the more conservative critical minds of mid-20th-century America.

Margaret Winning in Commonwealth summed up popular opinion of the book by describing it as "Beauty, wholesome philosophy, and honesty intermingled with stark realism, poverty, and continued struggle." Favorable, almost doting descriptions such as these were nearly ubiquitous. Meyer Berger in New Republic called the book "a faithful picture of a part of Brooklyn that was mostly slums and misery. The picture is softened by almost poetic handling." The manner in which Smith gently yet truthfully exposed the poverty of her characters won her acclaim from the political arena as well. An anonymously authored excerpt from The New York Times called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn "a remarkably good first novel," and inferred that it was a revolutionary advance in the literary world. "The author sees the misery, squalor, and cruelty of slum life but sees them with understanding, pity, and sometimes with hilarious humor. A welcome relief from the latter-day fashion of writing about slum folk as if they were all brutalized morons."

Interspersed with this positive feedback were statements of doubt concerning the morality and literary merit of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Some reviewers such as Margaret Winning in Commonwealth worried that the novel's "stark realism" was perhaps too stark, meaning that Smith's "wholesome philosophy" was accompanied by rather unwholesome sexual "incidents" that "may be too realistic for some readers." In critique of the novel's literary qualities, an anonymous article in Booklist reluctantly conceded that "as literary genre the book is interesting" but went on to say "the progress of the family from rags to riches could stand considerable blue pencilling." Rosemary Dawson in The New Yorker offered considerable praise of the beginning part of the novel, going so far as to call it "a beautiful and moving piece of work." Her disappointment with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as a work of literature was found in the end of the novel, where she accused it of taking on "more the mechanics of the usual popular piece of fiction." The most scathing criticism by far came from Diana Trilling in Library Journal:

"I am a little bewildered by so much response to so conventional a little book… I have seen 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn' compared to the novels of James Farrell, and all to the credit of Miss Smith's novel. This makes me very sad both for the condition of fiction reviewing and for Mr. Farrell, whatever his faults as a novelist of stature. Of course Francie Nolan's story is more cheerful than Danny O'Neill's and a more popular commodity, but surely popular taste should be allowed to find its emotional level without being encouraged to believe that a 'heart-warming' experience is a serious literary experience."

Cumulative Reviews:
Diana Trilling, Library Journal, May 1, 1943
New York Times, August 22, 1943
Book Week, August 22, 1943
Weekly Book Review, August 22, 1943
Rosemary Dawson, New Yorker, August 24, 1943
Springfield Republican, August 29, 1943
F.H. Bullock, Time, September 6, 1943
Meyer Berger, New Republic, September 6, 1943
Katharine Jocher, Saturday Review of Literature, September 11, 1943
Booklist, September 1943
Margaret Winning, Commonwealth, September 17, 1943
America Chapel, Atlantic, October 1943
New Yorker, October 9, 1943
Saturday Review of Literature, October 16, 1943
E.M.B., Social Forces, December 1943
Orville Prescott, Wisconsin Library Bulletin, October 1943
Yale Review, Autumn 1943
New York Times Magazine, December 12, 1943
New York Times Magazine, October 1, 1944
New York Times Magazine, May 28, 1944
New York Times Magazine, July 9, 1944
Publishers Weekly, May 27, 1944
Collier's, March 10, 1945

Sources:
Book Review Digest. 39th Annual Cumulation. The H.W. Wilson Company: New York, 1944.
Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. Vol. 14. The H.W. Wilson Company: New York, 1945.
Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. Vol. 15. The H.W. Wilson Company: New York, 1947.

Biography

Betty Smith was born as Elizabeth Wehner near the turn of the century in Brooklyn, New York. There is a discrepancy concerning the exact date of her birth. According to the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, she was born on December 15th, 1896. According to the Dictionary of American Biography, she was born 4 days later on December 19th. According to the Library of Congress' records, Betty was born 8 years later in 1904, although her daughters claim the earlier year, which is inscribed on her tombstone, is the correct one.

Betty was the oldest child of German immigrants John and Catherine Hummel Wehner. Her father died when she was twelve, and her mother later married an Irish immigrant named Michael Keogh. Desperate household economic conditions forced Betty to quit school and join the work force shortly after her father's death. As a fourteen-year-old with merely an eighth grade education, she found herself working at factory, office, and retail jobs in Brooklyn and Manhattan. In addition to learning to cook, sew, and dance at the Jackson Street settlement house, Betty developed an avid interest in the theater. In her spare time, she acted in several plays at the Williamsburg YMCA and she composed about seventy short dramatic plays.

The date of Betty's first marriage is also uncertain. In either 1913 or 1914, she married her childhood friend George H. E. Smith. The couple moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where George studied law at the University of Michigan. Permission was granted for Betty to enroll in the University as a special student between 1921 and 1922, and also between 1927 and 1931. During this time, Betty gave birth to two daughters named Nancy and Mary. She took every writing course offered at the University, but never earned a degree. In either 1930 or 1931 (the date is once again uncertain), Betty won the University's first annual Avery Hopwood Award and received $1000 for her play "Francie Nolan."

Shortly thereafter, the four members of the Smith family moved to New Haven, Connecticut. Betty continued to study playwriting at the Yale School of Drama, where for three years she studied under George P. Baker, Walter P. Eaton, and John Mason Brown and participated in Federal Theater projects. In 1934, the family moved to Detroit where Betty wrote features for the Detroit Free Press. After divorce ended her marriage in 1938, Betty and her daughters moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. While studying at the University of North Carolina, she earned a meager income by writing and acting for small local plays.

In her spare time, Betty wrote an autobiographical manuscript roughly based on her own childhood experiences. She entered this 1000-page manuscript in a Harper and Brothers writing contest. The publishing company coerced Betty to condense the manuscript into a 400-page novel that she decided to title A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Published in 1943, the novel sold 300,000 copies in its first six weeks and immediately found itself at the top of bestseller lists everywhere. During the first month of publication, Betty married the assistant editor of the Chapel Hill Weekly, Joseph Piper Jones.

Betty wrote three other novels, none of which achieved similar success to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, though her second novel, Tomorrow Will Be Better, was a bestseller for 1948. Her third novel, Maggie-Now was published in 1958, seven years after she divorced her second husband, and one year after she married her third and final husband, Robert Finch, an old friend. Her last novel, Joy in the Morning, was written in 1963, two years after Finch's death.

Secluded from the public, Betty passed away on January 17th, 1972 in Shelton, Connecticut. She left behind an unfinished autobiography that was never published. These and other manuscripts remain at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"The Tree Still Grows in Brooklyn"

The New York Times Book Review
January 3, 1999

By Robert Cornfield

Betty Smith was five years older than her creation, Francie Nolan, who was born in 1901. Francie was the tree that grew in Brooklyn, the one that blossomed out of the pavements, whose strength was not recognized because the breed was so common. ''It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement.'' ''A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,'' published in 1943, was an immediate best seller, and since then has become for its devoted readers a treasured rite of passage. A friend told me it was where she first learned at 12 about sex. Another reader was dismayed to realize that her mother had purloined incidents from Francie's childhood and made them her own, telling her daughter tales from the book as if she had lived them herself. The novelist Helen Schulman would read the book again and again, never finishing, each time starting from the beginning so that for her the book never ended.

Francie is the tree, and so is the book itself. It is, tested by time, one of the most cherished of American novels, recording in its powerful fashion the first years of this century in a breeding place of American genius, Brooklyn's Williamsburg and Greenpoint. In the novel's period these neighborhoods were mostly populated by a poverty-level mix of the two great waves of immigrants, the Irish and the Germans of the mid-19th century and the East European Jews and Italians who followed. In another novel, ''Maggie-Now,'' Smith names the whole neighborhood: ''There were so many races; so many creeds and sects all huddled together in an area not more than a mile square. The people called each other names: Mick, Heinie, Guinea, Hunky, Polack, Wop, Sheeny, Squarehead, Bohunk, Chick and Greaseball. They called the few Indians, who they believed were really Gypsies, niggers.''

Francie is second-generation American. Her father, Johnny Nolan, has an Irish background, while that of her mother, Katie Rommely, is Austrian. Yet the streets, the food, the jobs, the morals, loose and strict (a mother and her illegitimate child are stoned), the apartments are common memories. And the veracity of the tale was remarked on by reviewers right away: it is in Smith's sharp memory for detail -- for the size and weight of tin cans, for the differences in butcher shops, for the shoes of the aged. Today, Williamsburg is a mostly Hispanic and Italian neighborhood. The tenements have been replaced with housing developments, but its main thoroughfares, if you look above the storefronts, are much the same as they were for Francie. The public and parochial schools, the churches, the library, the synagogues (some of them converted to other uses) are there still. A local library has a banner proclaiming Brooklyn's finest writers: Walt Whitman, Maurice Sendak, Marianne Moore, Richard Wright and Betty Smith. Siegel Street, where Smith tells us ''Jewtown'' began, now has an alternate name -- Via San Vicente Pallotti -- and nearby Graham Avenue (Smith described it as Ghetto Street, filled with pushcarts) is also known as Via Vespucci. Life, if not swell, is better there now -- neighboring Bedford Stuyvesant or Bushwick might tell another tale, one closer to that of Smith's novel.

When I was young I avoided the book, though I always liked the 1945 film adaptation, directed by Elia Kazan, its plot reworked intelligently by the novelist and screenwriter Tess Slesinger and her husband, Frank Davis, who sharpened the character of the mother and shortened the time frame. It was a girl's book, and I preferred the swashbuckling novels of Rafael Sabatini and books about collies or German shepherds. From them I moved on to ''Look Homeward, Angel'' and never returned to ''adolescent'' literature. I've come late to ''A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,'' and though its intense study of a mother-daughter relationship still categorizes it as a ''girl's book,'' I was wrong to hold out. But then again maybe the book has grown better since its first appearance. Some books do. Certainly, the novel has grand ambitions. It is nothing less than a portrait of the artist as a young girl, and Smith set out not only to record a young life but to show where a writer's ambition and will come from. It is a story of triumph over adversity. Francie, spat upon, ridiculed, molested, betrayed by her first love, trusts her imagination to save her. Of her education, Smith says, ''Brutalizing is the only adjective for the public schools of that district.'' The librarian, who ''hated children,'' notices nothing about the girl working her way down the shelves from A to Z. Just before her graduation, Francie's teacher advises her to burn her essays about her father and ''poverty, starvation and drunkenness'' and instead to write of ''the true nobility of man.'' ''A Tree Grows in Brooklyn'' is Francie's revenge. Yet the mean social existence she dramatizes is countered by Francie's family inheritance: Johnny Nolan's romantic spirit and Katie's refusal to be beaten. Francie's illiterate maternal grandmother instructs Katie in what will make for success in America: the children must know how to read and write, and they must believe in heaven so they will have something to hope for; every day read them one page of the Bible and Shakespeare, and put money in a tin can nailed to the floor so that one day you will own some property (the property turns out to be Johnny Nolan's cemetery plot).

The book is a social document with the power of Jacob Riis's photographs. It gives the detail that illuminates the past -- the coffee pot, the air shaft, the barber's cup, chalking strangers on Halloween. But it is the book's emotional life that has kept it in print. Though the recording angel, its center of consciousness, is Francie, the dramatic center is her mother, Katie, filled with ambivalences that will determine the lives of her children. The study of Katie is bold, deadly, without sentiment: a disenchanted mother who without hatred wishes the alcoholic husband dead (''He's worthless, worthless. And God forgive me for ever finding it out''), and who coolly plots her future once he is out of the way. The mother who acknowledges her preference for her son over her daughter -- she loves him more -- but who depends on her daughter's salary and who asks her forgiveness. It is the mother who says of the daughter: ''She does not love me the way the boy loves me. . . . She does not understand me.'' Smith's achievement is to make this woman's steely resolve, her fierce sense of reality, her struggle with her own character, not only comprehensible but admirable. The novel's famous set pieces are Katie's labor pains, the attempted rape of Francie, Francie's graduation flowers from her dead father, and Aunt Sissy, who works in a condom factory (a 1950 Broadway musical version made her the protagonist), faking pregnancy: she claimed the reason she wasn't ''showing'' in front was that the baby she was carrying was in the back.

The book's determination to fill in all the details, to get everyone and everything in, and to follow its heroine through adolescence, leaves it shaggy -- the movie does a firm editing job on its dutifulness. But Smith has a treasure lode and she knows it -- and in this one book she gives all of it away. The intensity of her recall provides the book with its graceless but sincere sentiment and style. Smith's three subsequent novels do not repeat the material or power of her first. ''Tomorrow Will Be Better'' (1948), set in the 20's, tells of a young marriage; its bold conclusion is the wife's realization that her husband is a repressed homosexual. ''Joy in the Morning'' (1963), now back in print, is a cheery campus marriage tale. And the more ambitious ''Maggie-Now'' (1958) is a study of the Irish in America. The books are plodding and intelligent, oddly melancholy, but they lack the neurotic impulses and driven recall of her first. Smith wrote that one book we each have in us, and hers remains the most telling Brooklyn novel, our best depiction of this city's poor at the turn of the century. It is the Dickensian novel of New York that we didn't think we had.

''Brooklyn,'' Francie tells her brother at the end of the novel. ''It's a magic city and it isn't real. . . . It's like -- yes -- a dream. . . . But it's like a dream of being poor and fighting.'' The civilization of Smith's Williamsburg exists in very few living memories -- it will be soon a century away. In that stretch of Brooklyn and on the Lower East Side, you still find Francie's streets and tenements. And when even these isolated signposts are gone, the spirit of the book, the lives and struggles it celebrates, will be with us, reminding us of who we were and who we still are.

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Robert Cornfield is the author of a book about the Brooklyn restaurant Lundy's, and recently edited the writings of Edwin Denby.